Quote:
Originally Posted by Disfrutalavida
I started with IBM 1130 assembler, BASIC and Fortran, then moved to IITran and if I remember correctly, and I may not, COBOL, on a System 7, IBM 360/30 and 50.
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I'm at least old enough to have dealt with an IBM 1130, although it was in high school and obsolete even then. FORTRAN IV ... remember three-valued IF statements? Actually, there are times I miss them. I've been accused of writing FORTRAN programs in every language I code in, particularly Perl. It's sort of how English speakers learning Spanish put adjectives before nouns, and Spanish speakers learning English try to assign gender to nouns: your first language influences your mental grammar, and that's as true of programming languages as it is of spoken ones.
As far as SF, I like a wide range of stuff, with heavy emphasis on such things as the classic Heinlein juveniles (they're too good to be limited to kids) and a lot of the classic writers (and I still can't go to a con without looking around for Hal Clement for a moment before I remember....). I think that's one of the reasons why I'm such a techno-junkie: I don't like being away from my ebook reader, my netbook, my Nintendo DS, my cell phone, my mp3 player, my assortment of laser pointers in several colors, my pocket video camera, and all the other doodads, because they are, to me, emblematic of the SF future that I'm now living in. Alvin Toffler got it wrong: the future is
fun!